Reviews provided by Syndetics
Publishers Weekly Review
Fans of Barker's Regeneration trilogy know she has a gift for combining real and imagined characters, for making you see the horrors of war, and for knowing that people don't stop having sex or being themselves because there's a war on. This story, which revisits the characters of Barker's last novel, Life Class, and is also set before and during WWI, features some of these traits, but, alas, without the fierce immediacy that made the trilogy so memorable. The titular Toby is painter Elinor Brooke's brother; they're close, problematically so; when news comes that he's "missing, believed dead," the need to know what happened takes over Elinor. In time, it reconnects her to Kit Neville, part of Toby's team of medics, and Paul Tarrant, soldiers and war artists who were her fellow students, and, in Paul's case, her former lover. Part mystery, part exploration of the varieties and vagaries of love and grief, part a description of British efforts to devise prosthetics and document the worst injuries, the book covers a lot of ground-perhaps too much. Readers may not feel the same urgency that Elinor does, and the eventual solution to the mystery, coming as it does amid all the other themes, doesn't pack the necessary punch. Agent: Gillon Aitken, Aitken Alexander Associates. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Barker is firmly established in the realm of historical fiction due to her much-celebrated Regeneration Trilogy about Britain during WWI (Regeneration, 1991; The Eye in the Door, 1994; The Ghost Road, 1995). Although her latest novel is not in a trilogy, it does share with her recent Life Class (2008) a London art-academy setting. Again, it's wartime. The carnage in Flanders fields is graphically brought to the home front in the ravaged literally faces of returned soldiers. Art student Elinor Brooke's relationship with her brother, Toby, goes beyond usually accepted norms. When Toby is killed in battle, Elinor is obsessed with learning the details of his death. This obsession leads her on a long physical and mental journey, with the reader following along in rapt attention. As always, Barker constructs easily consumed sentences, each contributing to the sturdy, compelling story line, and although Elinor's obsession could have easily grown wearying, Barker's sympathetic treatment prevents the reader from reaching that point. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Publicity and marketing strategies are commensurate with the high regard Barker holds among serious fiction readers, especially fans of historical novels.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2010 Booklist
Kirkus Book Review
Booker Prize winner Barker revisits some students at the Slade art school in the years before and after their experiences in Life Class (2008). Part One, set in 1912, explains one reason why Elinor Brooke is the Slade's edgiest student; on a visit to her wealthy parents' country home, she has an incestuous one-night stand with her brother, Toby. Elinor flings herself into a dissection class at London Hospital, hoping to elevate her life-drawing skills to the exacting standards of Slade professor Henry Tonks. She also becomes close friends with arrogant, ambitious Kit Neville and meets new Slade student Paul Tarrant just before Part Two sweeps us ahead to 1917, in the thick of World War I. Toby is missing, believed killed; Paul and Kit have both been wounded, Kit with facial injuries that take him to Queen's Hospital, where Tonks makes portraits of the disfigured men to assist the medical staff. "How can any human being endure this?" Elinor wonders as she looks at this work. It's a rare moment of compassion for Elinor, who has hardened noticeably in the five-year interval and is obsessed with finding out what happened to Toby. A note among his belongings sent home from the front suggests that Kit knows something, and Elinor enlists her erstwhile lover Paul--whom she's barely visited since he was wounded--to confront Kit in the hospital. Kit refuses to tell them anything, but the sordid truth about Toby's fate does eventually come out. War's horrors are a familiar subject for Barker, and she has always been a trenchant, uncompromising writer, but this sour work is far below the best pages of Life Class, let alone the majestic pessimism of her masterpiece, the Regeneration trilogy (Regeneration, 1992, etc.). Here, she seems to be exploring with diminishing returns themes that once displayed her gifts more fully. A rare disappointment from one of England's finest writers.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.